The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term that refers to a network computing environment in which physical things such as devices, objects, and other things, etc., are equipped with unique identifiers, network connectivity, and other embedded technologies, which allows such devices, objects, and things to sense, communicate, interact, and send/receive data over one or more communications networks (e.g., Internet, etc.) without requiring human-to-human or human-to computer interaction. For an IoT application, a “thing” may include any object that can be assigned an IP address and have the capability to transfer data over a communications network. For example, a “thing” can be a heart monitoring implant within individual, an animal with a biochip transponder, an automobile with one or more integrated sensors to sense operating conditions of the automobile, etc.
IoT technology is considered to be a key enabler for many emerging and future “smart” applications and, consequently, there is expected to be an exponential increase in the number of network connected devices, objects, and autonomous things, which are connected over a communications network such as the Internet. Current IoT technologies are heavily dependent on the Internet for uploading/downloading data to/from an IoT service provider, as well as transmitting data between network connected IoT devices, objects, and things. In this regard, as the number of network connected IoT devices increases, the Internet will become an increasingly problematic bottleneck for IoT data upload/download for IoT services, which will lead to decreased IoT network performance. Moreover, while IoT service providers typically depend on cloud computing platforms to provide IoT services, the back-end storage systems of cloud computing platforms are not optimized for IoT applications, which can further lead to degraded performance of IoT services.